Thermodynamics and Transport Properties (TTP) is a central subject in the majority of chemical engineering curricula worldwide and it is thus of interest to know how it is taught today in various countries if chemical engineering education is to be improved. A survey of graduate thermodynamics education in the USA was performed a few years ago by Visco et al. [1] but as far as we know no systematic study of the undergraduate thermodynamics education has been performed, at least in recent years. In the present study, a survey about TTP education in Europe and the USA is presented. Results were obtained from nearly twenty different European countries and the USA and in total answers from about 150 universities were used for this study. The study is performed under the auspices of the Working Party of Thermodynamics and Transport Properties of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering.
The survey was performed using a web based surveying system for which invitations were sent out to the universities by local representatives who were responsible for one or more countries each.
Of the universities that answered more than 70 % offer BSc education 65 % offer MSc education and 55 % offer PhD education. Most universities offer at least two courses of thermodynamics. The following discussion is mainly based on the first two (undergraduate) courses reported. Half of these are taught to chemical engineers exclusively whereas the rest are taught with other branches of engineering, mainly mechanical and / or process engineering.
In general two sets of course lengths were observed, corresponding either to a full semester of full time studies or to quarter of a semester. Most courses are centered around lectures and exercise classes with little or no laboratory work whereas home assignments are given in the vast majority (70-80 %) of the courses.
The first course is mainly centered around the first and second law of thermodynamics whereas the second course is frequently more concentrated on phase equilibria. Both of these courses are mainly comprising of classical thermodynamics whereas the molecular interpretation often is touched upon. An analysis of the differences between thermodynamics education in Europe and the USA in presently being undertaken and results from this will also be presented. An investigation of the use of thermodynamics within industry is also on-going within the Working Party and results will be reported in the near future.
[1] S.K.Dube, D.P. Visco, Chem. Eng. Ed., 2005, 258-263.

The purpose of this article is to construct an ethical position of Academic Development Programmes where managerial, top-down principles, are rejected because of the disciplinary resistance such positions bring in the reluctance of recognising existing teaching practices. Instead a focus on particularity through the acceptance of professional difference in an interdisciplinary dialogue is put forward where comparative didactics and interfaith dialogue bring new abilities for university teachers to become better practitioners within their own fields of teaching.

Academic teacher development is an educational meeting place for academics already practising the art of teaching. Yet, it is in courses for this development that academics are supposed to be taught how to teach and how to improve their teaching skills. In my article I propose a new conceptual methodological framework for teaching teachers how to teach – Didactic Reasoning. Its foundation can be traced to pragmatist philosophy and interfaith dialogue in theology. The key aspect of Didactic Reasoning is to make university teachers better teachers by the development of a didactic voice and the courage to try this voice in teaching activities. This is done through intersubjective meetings between academics to develop a respect for the ‘teaching-other’ in their colleagues and through the use of practice-focused themed conversations led by teacher educators.

Social capital theorist Robert Putnam (2007) argued that diversity produces fear and leads people to disconnect from one another. For student teachers, diversity of whatever kind--ethnicity, religion, class, disability, gender, or sexuality--generates fear and an expectation that it has to be managed. Civic education within teacher education has a crucial role in facilitating an active engagement with diversity among beginning teachers, and the author argues that teacher education can and should do this by providing students with opportunities to encounter diversity--opportunities that provoke and require change. She contends that teacher education is the ideal place for beginning teachers to acquire a "passion for equality", and far from compromising their intellectual independence, it is likely to strengthen it.

This article provides an introduction to theoretical ideas and practices from the so-called “philosophers of difference” — Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari — as an invitation to think differently about the construction of learning disability and to envision new forms of learning. Two key concepts, Foucault's transgression and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, are presented, and examples from research on learning disability and other dimensions of disability are given to illustrate their potential. The theoretical practices of deconstruction, developed by Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic analysis are also presented and exemplified. The article argues that these theoretical concepts and practices, if taken up, shift the researcher towards an ethics of research and toward greater responsibility. Implications are discussed in the final part of the paper.

This paper reports on a process of en-gagement with administrators and Government Ministers in dialogue about diversity that was informed by Disability Studies in Education, a discipline that critiques existing ways of thinking about disability, actively promotes more positive constructions and representations of disabled people's lives and challenges conventional or traditional notions of normalcy It took place within a project, initiated by Council of Europe, Policies and practices for socio-cultural diversity and involved the development of a framework of teacher competences for socio-cultural diversity. The paper charts the process of developing the framework and reports the dialogue that took place. The Ministers and administrators were encouraged to view teaching as a dialogue and to recognise teachers' competence in responding to diversity, following Levinas (1969; 1996), a philosopher who addresses questions of ethics, as a continuing responsibility of teachers to their students.

Abstract: This examines the policy and practices of inclusion within Europe. It explores the uncertainty surrounding inclusion, among researchers and teachers, and levels of confusion about its precise meaning. The paper also examines the shifting political and policy contexts which create barriers to inclusion but also highlights some of the powerful legal frameworks which enable entitlements to inclusion to be upheld. Recent patterns and trends towards inclusion and indeed exclusion are considered and the paper ends with a discussion of the prospects and possibilities for inclusion.

Inclusion is currently characterised by c onfusion about what it is supposed to be and do; frustration at the way the current climate of standards and accountability constrains teachers’ work; guilt at the ex clusion created for individual pupils; and exhaustion, associated with a sense of fa ilure and futility. This chapter considers the ‘impossibility’ of inclusion in the current context and how it has become a highly emotive and somewhat irrational sp ace of confrontation, with questions about how we should include being disp laced by questions about why we should include and under what conditions. An attempt is made to rescue inclusion from its valedictory state and to reframe it as an ongoing struggle and a more productive form of political engagement. This reframing takes some of the key ideas of the philosophers of difference – Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Foucault – and puts them to work on the inclusion problem (Allan, 2008).

This paper examines inclusion in Scotland and in Europe. It considers some of the uncertainties surrounding inclusion and the questions – many of which give cause for concern – that are currently being raised by researchers, teachers and their representative unions, parents and children. The shifting political and policy contexts and recent patterns and trends in Scotland and across Europe, which illustrate key points of exclusion, as well as some of the challenges to these, are reported. A ‘landmark’ challenge to discrimination of Roma children, achieved within the European Convention on Human Rights, is presented as an illustration of the scope for asserting the right to inclusion. The paper ends with a discussion of the prospects and possibilities for inclusion. The significance of the barriers to inclusion is acknowledged and it is argued that there is an urgent need to address the competing policy demands within education and the problems associated with fragmented provision. A call is also made for research involving children, young people and families in order to inform practice.

This article reports on a Council of Europe project, Policies and Practices for Teaching Sociocultural Diversity, undertaken between 2006 and 2009. The project was undertaken in three phases and involved a survey of teacher education policies and practices in relation to sociocultural diversity across Europe, a conceptual analysis and the development of a framework of teacher competences for sociocultural diversity. The article charts the process of developing the framework and reports on the engagement with the key stakeholders - policy makers, teachers and students. The features of the competence framework, informed by Levinas and emphasising the teacher's responsibility to the Other, are discussed.

This paper is concerned with the teacher educator who is aspiring to be inclusive. It considers the obligations which arise within Higher Education Institutions and the extent to which these contribute to a loss of civic engagement and a lack of capacity to pursue inclusion, social justice and equity. The paper argues that this need not be the case and a reorientation for teacher educators is offered which affords teacher educators opportunities to, in Bourdieu's terms, ‘play seriously’. This reorientation is in relation to three significant spaces – the ontological, the aesthetic and the epiphanic – and it is argued that operating within these spaces could enable new practices of inclusive teacher education to emerge.

This article charts the emergence of the sociology of disability and examines the areas of contestation. These have involved a series of erasures and absences – the removal of the body from debates on the social model of disability; the disappearance of the Other from educational policies and practices; and the absence of academics from political discourses and action. The paper considers the contribution of the sociology of disability to inclusive education and examines some of the objections currently being voiced. It ends with some reflections on the possibilities for academics within the sociology of disability to pursue alternative forms of engagement and outlines a series of duties that they might undertake.

Social capital, children and young people is about the relationships and networks - social capital - that children and young people have in and out of school. Social capital has become of increasing interest to policy makers but there has been little evidence of how it operates in practice. In this unique collection, the social capital of children and young people, and in one case parents and teachers, is explored in a wide range of formal and informal settings. The contributors to the book, who include academic researchers and educational professionals, provide in-depth accounts of social capital being developed and used by children and young people. They offer critical reflections on the significance of social capital and on the experiences of researching the social capital of sometimes vulnerable people. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with how children and young people get along, get by and get on.

This paper reports on a knowledge exchange project, funded by the Scottish Funding Council and undertaken by a group of researchers from three higher education institutions in Scotland and the project partner, Sistema Scotland. This newly established charity is attempting to implement a major programme of social change, developed in Venezuela, within the Raploch, a disadvantaged area of Scotland. The researchers’ combined knowledge of education, music and psychology has guided their knowledge exchange activities with the project partner and among themselves. The paper outlines the development of Sistema Scotland and the programme, El Sistema, on which it is based. It details the knowledge exchange activities undertaken, which used Derrida’s notion of aporia to try to engage Sistema Scotland with different perspectives and understandings, and a practical method for conducting meetings based on Open Space Technology. The various ‘encounters’ with children, service providers and stakeholders are reported and this is followed by a critique of the processes of knowledge exchange. The paper ends with a discussion of the prospects for successful knowledge exchange.

The medicalisation of the behaviour of children is a phenomenon that is attracting growing attention, with particular concern about the increased likelihood of children living in disadvantaged contexts receiving a medical diagnosis, such as attention-de fi cit hyperactivity disorder, and treatment. This paper reports on a study of professionals involved with children experiencing behavioural problems. The professionals interviewed in this study articulated their own reservations about the medicalisation of children ’ s behaviour and revealed a number of strate- gies for interrupting the process towards diagnosis. These interruptions, analysed using Deleuze and Guattari ’ s concept of deterriorialisation, took place along linguistic, visual and affective planes and were successful in encouraging teachers and head teachers to see alternatives to the medical route. The fi ndings have implications for existing practice in the response to, and support for, behavioural problems and for teacher education.

This paper reports on a specific event which attempted to facilitate discussions with children and young people about diversity issues, including disability. The concept of social capital was operationalised and used as both a resource to stimulate discussions and as an explicit goal. The paper first reports on the processes involved and the topics identified for discussion by the children and young people and then considers their engagement with disability. Their insights on knowing disability, relationships, and provision and support illustrate a shift from an essentialising of impairment to an articulation of barriers which excluded disabled people and the lessons which teachers might take from these are discussed.

Education at University of Borås is internationally connected to varying degree and form. This report looks at a selection of initiatives in order to explore the past, present and future role of UB internationalization. As a basis for the review, 7 students are interviewed on their international experience in their education – exchange studies and minor field studies (MFS) respectively. The participants stress the role of personal development and career enablement, and perceive their international experience as a distinct, unique element of their education. Possibilities and problems are then identified and related to the current literature on international education, learning and pedagogics. The study lands in a critical discussion on the future development of UB education. Key points of development: To meet the Bologna 20 percent commitment, more efforts need to be made on promoting and enabling internationalization to students, faculty and administrators. Curricular hurdles need to be removed as not to hamper students’ programme progression for going abroad. Teachers’ competency building efforts such as the Teaching and learning in higher education course could benefit from further elements of internationalization.

This article describes some concepts central to education for professional practise, as they emerged out of the efforts of a working party at the University College of Borås (UCB), Sweden. The working party was part of a project preparing an application for full university status to the Swedish government. Adopting the professional doctorate, as it has emerged in Australia and the UK, was one fundamental idea. The Swedish Higher Education system is briefly described as is the UCB. The relation between knowledge and practice in learning for professional activity and performance is discussed.